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'She
was screaming, 'I don't know how to swim,'' Deputy Cazi Navarro, who
arrived at the scene after Richardson, told the Sentinel.

'Once the car went down, she went
down,' he said, 'So I stripped down and went and got her.'

As the
woman was being taken out of the water, deputies said she yelled that her child
was still in the car.

'She
kept screaming, 'my baby, my baby,'" Richardson said.

Leak-proof safety: The lucky mom and child were rushed to the hospital and released in critical but stable condition

'You couldn't see anything because it was so dark ... Somebody spotted something in the water. So now as I'm getting to this thing that I found floating in the water, I saw it was a pamper, and attached to the pamper was this little girl,' he recalled.

When police
recovered Sariyah she was lifeless but rushed to Joe DiMaggio's Children's
Hospital where she was eventually released with her mother, in a critical but stable condition.

A dive team
later found the body of the child's father trapped in the car, identified as 27-year-old Sandro Michel.

Violent past: Father Sandro Michael had three previous domestic violence arrests on his record, two of which involved Ms Copeland

Witnesses
told authorities that before the car went into the lake it was driving
erratically and the driver and passenger appeared to be struggling for
control of the steering wheel.